Beijing is busy releasing propaganda pictures of smiling Han Chinese leaving the hospital having just recovered from the Uighur riots. Smiling children, colorful flowers and pink-cheeked local officials feature prominently in the photos.

These tableaux show to all the world that nothing has changed in Beijing's infantile estimation of its own people since the Mao era, when cheerful, chubby-cheeked Tibetans framed against blue skies featured in propaganda posters soon after the Chinese invaded Tibet. Evidence enough, if any were needed, that China has no notion of how to deal with the Uighur problem in Xinjiang. Where, one wants to ask, are the photos of Uighurs suffering under the Chinese boot--those disappeared, imprisoned or otherwise brutalized for not signing on to the program of Chinafication?

It matters not a whit that China's second-quarter GDP growth neared 8% despite a global recession: Wealth will not resolve the matter. As many have observed, growth in the Xinjiang region has mostly benefited the newly placed Han population who get most of the jobs. But that too is not the point. Nor is it a story of global jihad stoking instability, the narrative Beijing, for obvious reasons, would have us believe. The Uighurs are not a particularly religious bunch. Some might resort to Islamic extremism as the Chechens did out of despair, but, no, that is not where the truth lies--for two important reasons.

First, for some years China and Pakistan have cooperated clandestinely to funnel potentially Islamist Uighur youths out of Xinjiang. The two countries have worked together strategically for decades against India, not least in the area of nuclear research, but also in other ways. Many years ago in Afghanistan I met the late Ahmad Shah Masood, the ethnically Tajik resistance leader. He wanted to tell the world media that, in skirmishes against the Taliban, he kept capturing Muslim Chinese prisoners who had been fighting on the Taliban side. I discovered I could roughly communicate with them in Turkish--they were indeed Turkic Uighurs. Nobody in the West knew who the Uighurs were, and in those pre-9/11 years nobody cared to know, so I couldn't pass the story on.

The prisoners told a sad tale: To escape oppression at home, they had acted on promises of freedom abroad via underground Muslim networks based in nearby Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their handlers got them out of China with great ease, and soon they were being trained for jihad in the Pakistani and Afghan tribal areas, whereas they'd hoped to find work and a decent life. Having been indoctrinated, they were doubly bewildered when they had to fight fellow Muslims in Afghanistan. Their jihadist handlers, they said, insulted and brutalized them for being ignorant of their faith. Even Masood chuckled at their all-around cluelessness.

That is not the only reason why the Islamic terrorist label doesn't plausibly stick on the Uighurs. But it's a strong reason--the jihadist network never intended to aim them back at China and indeed colludes with China to help redirect simmering Uighur discontent. We know all we need to know from the deafening silence of Islamist groups who offered no sympathy for the Uighurs during the unrest.

Above all, though, the Uighurs don't fit the jihadi mold for cultural reasons. The women are not sequestered; they work, they study, and they operate as equals. The Uighur form of Islam has always followed a Central Asian animist tradition comparable to the moderate Kirghiz and Kazakh variety. Uighurs identify with their own Turkic ethnicity first and foremost. No one outside Turkey has noticed that the riots occurred barely a week after Turkish President Abdullah Gul stopped by Xingiang--the first visit ever by a Turkish president--during a ceremonial state visit to China. He spoke of the Uighurs being a "bridge of friendship" between the two countries. One can easily see how the seething locals perhaps interpreted that as the ultimate betrayal of their hopes that Turkey, at least, might act as mediator for their grievances.
Charles Hill, writing for Forbes, gave a very useful thumbnail sketch of Uighur history over the centuries. What he didn't say, though, is how the Chinese see the same history: They take the official view that Xinjiang has always been part of China, rather as they do with Tibet. Never mind that for a full thousand years until the 1700s, during the Qing dynasty, no power based in China ruled Xinjiang. The Qings were Manchurians, and even they controlled only parts of the Xinjiang region and those only sporadically. The Chinese took over fully in 1949, promising autonomy, and only in recent years have they dispensed with that myth altogether by moving in Han Chinese settlers en masse.
In the end, of course, it hardly matters if the Chinese view of history is factual. Many Chinese no doubt believe it. The Uighurs certainly don't. They resent Chinese suzerainty as a naked land-and-resource grab for Xinjiang's oil and other resources, and they resent even more the Chinese fiction that Xinjiang was a raw, unevolved territory with a nascent civilization, one that needed China to complete its evolution. The region had a rich historical pedigree without Chinese help. In the 11th century Mahmud of Kashgar created the first dictionary of the Turkic language called Divani Lugati Turk. He drew a map of the Turkic world and is said to be the first to have drawn a map of Japan. The storied oasis-city of Kashgar functioned for centuries, millennia even, as a pivot on the Silk Road featuring prominently in travelers' tales up to World War II and beyond, notably in News From Tartary, Peter Fleming's classic 1936 memoir of trekking across the Gobi. The British consul's Kashgar house, named "Chini-Bagh," offered a haven for weary Western Silk Road adventurers for decades. In Khotan, Lop Nor, Yarkand and other places the world unearthed the cultural influences of Buddhists, Tibetans, Karakhitai Turks, Mongols and others. China's claim to Xinjiang is a matter of force and numbers only.
Mahmud the Kashgari's mausoleum is preserved near Kashgar, but in Kashgar itself the quiet old streets have been bulldozed and replaced by high-rises and roaring traffic, all in the twinkling of an eye. Doubtless, the Chinese see this as a form of beneficence, a forcible enlisting of Uighurs in the brave, new consumerist future of China as the number one industrial engine of the world. Perhaps the locals, if given a chance or a say, might have done it differently. They might have preserved more of their heritage--but the Chinese wouldn't understand, as they've paved over much of their own history in Beijing and Shanghai.
Which is why, ultimately, the central government in Beijing has no notion of resolving the discontents of the Uighurs. The formula that barely keeps its own ethnic Han population quiescent, that of trampling on the past and present in a surge for leadership in the future, simply won't work for long in largely ethnic lands. Uighurs have no stake in looking and feeling like the rest of China, any more than Tibetans do, whatever the rewards in consumer benefits. They didn't immigrate to China, nor did they export jihad or bother the Chinese who came to them without invitation, precedent or legitimacy.
Still, that is what empires do--or did. Beijing seems to have no idea that empires are a thing of the past. The measure of legitimacy in these things comes down to one criterion: How much happiness do you bring to the "fraternal" population (as the Soviets used to dub their subject peoples)? Do you improve their lives? Do their lives need improving? Have you liberated any portion of the population from being oppressed by any other, or are you invoking such notions merely to disguise outright exploitation? If Xinjiang were the Amazon basin, what would we think of Beijing's forcible embrace?
We know, or should know, how to score such a test as applied to China's conduct up to today. It's probably too late for a withdrawal and separation of populations, a case of Macbeth's "I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more/ Returning were as tedious as go o'er." In which case China needs to decide: Is it ready for a sustained civil war Ã*la Chechnya for decades, an unhealable wound in its flank? Is it ready for multicultural federalism? For Uighurs attaining legitimate success on a national and international scale, such as African-Americans have achieved in the U.S.? Can China conceive of a Uighur (or Tibetan) president? Because that is the kind of challenge it is setting itself for the not-so-distant future.

Melik Kaylan, a writer based in New York, writes a weekly column for Forbes. His story "Georgia In The Time of Misha" is featured in The Best American Travel Writing 2008.